KotH Boathouse

Hey everybody! The time has finally arrived... My map is ready for testing! This is my first "finished" map. I've made lots of map doodles of varying stages of completion (at least one embarrassingly close to completion when I got bored of it haha!)

Boathouse is a king of the hill map set at nighttime in the middle of the swamp. It's main gimmick is that the CP is on top of a boat elevator which raises and lowers periodically as well as whenever a team captures it. While raised players fight in the mostly wide open boathouse itself, but while lowered the battlefield shifts to the much more claustrophobic waterways beneath.

I don't know very many people who play TF2 and I really have no good way to test this map without help, so I am looking for testers! Since this is the first release I'm looking for any bugs or suggestions you may have. The main things I'd like feedback on above all are first and foremost--the gameplay (I'm especially worried that snipers/wrangled sentries will be a bit too good right now)--and secondly the light levels in the map as I'm worried it may be a little too dark in some areas.

Please download the map and give it a shot, and if you have the ability to, please test it with some friends! I eagerly await your feedback

The one thing about fences within the gameplay area is that noone likes to lake linear paths when the map is so open. Their linear movements make it easy to ambush as soldier/demo and even easier to headshot as sniper; which is often an issue what with the previously mentioned fact of the map being more open than the linear paths allow. IT also makes it difficult for spy's to take evasive action.

Water is often a massive trap if it's very difficult to get out of. Maps like thundermountain have a river, which is fine with it's gentle slopes that allow you to exit at a wide number of places, but otherwise it makes players very vulnerable if they have to exit at a set of stairs. These are easily camped and/or blocked off with engi buildings (even teleporters). Even in 2fort, escaping via the sewers with the intelligence with the hope of healing up at the medium health packs often just leaves you being ambushed and the intel camped for minutes, even if it's on your side of the map.

i personally believe that the environmental lighting i VERY low. the outside of the map seems rife with pitch-black models. up your "sun" lighting and your ambient lighting.

also i agree with grazr about the paths and the sightlines.

i'd also suggest not using lights that have a strong red or blue tint to them, it can make a blue guy look red and vice versa.

the moving platform for the CP is a nice idea, however that means it's harder to defend as engis cannot build on such platforms, and stickybombs will simply bounce off them (similar to the extending walkways on nuclus)
edit: also, don't feel that you need to have some special doodad or gimmick on your maps. i'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it can mean extra work for you to try and explain it quickly and easily via the map itself to players joining the game and not expecting things to occur outside the pre-established rules of tf2

in regards to testing. tf2m runs regular test events. just submit your map to the next one when the thread pops up in the events subforum.

this was a note here, i'm making a triumph, big headcrab.
aperture spycrab, we do what we must because we can.

The idea behind the platform raising and lowering came from noticing that KotH maps can get kind of stalemated sometimes or one team is just so good at defending that the match becomes boring. So it's supposed to be hard to defend. If one team gets too entrenched then eventually all those defenses will need to adapt when the platform moves.

The light does seem low to me too, I just took the values from Pipeline, since that's the sky I'm using, so not sure why it's SO dark (or is Pipeline really that dark?) I wanted to make sure you guys ran through it based on some of your comments. The water is really shallow in almost all areas of the map, in fact I think there's only about 2-3 spots where you can even put your head under so it's more of a visual effect really then a trap. That's a good point about the red and blue lights, I hadn't really thought about them making players look the wrong color. Guess that was an instance of style over function haha.

So if I wanted to increase the ambient lighting, what would be a good thing to tweak? I do want it to be at night, so I don't want it to get so light out that the sky no longer matches up.

I tried to add a bit more with those lanterns you see in some of the screenshots but I don't think they're enough right now. Actually I was having some trouble with those. At first I was using just a "light" entity but that tended to create an extremely bright spot because they're all kind of close to walls/ceilings. I switched it to a directional light and that fixed the bright spot but I think I need to increase the radius on them.

Also the boards do line up, I made sure of that early on. If you're looking at the screenshot with the angled part of the boardwalk, it's cut that way. I think it's more realistic to have the boards look like they're shortened rather than angled which would be a more expensive thing to do if you were making that boardwalk. I'm gonna look into the lighting problems again when I have some free time. Have any of you guys had the time to run around in it? Critiquing from the screenshots is great, but I'd love to hear how you think it feels as a whole.